At Twain’s Home, an Era He Skewered

A Review of ‘The Gilded Age of Hartford,’ at Twain’s Home

A Columbia Ordinary Bicycle and woman’s cycling costume, from about 1879.Credit
John Groo/Connecticut Historical Society

You would expect to be amused at an exhibition generously peppered with the wit and wisdom of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the writer better known as Mark Twain. And the new show at the Mark Twain House and Museum, “The Gilded Age of Hartford,” does indeed deliver entertainment as it documents the rising fortunes and changing social framework of Hartford in the 1870s, ’80s and ’90s.

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The Leatherman, a vagrant who, dressed all in leather, regularly walked between the Connecticut and Hudson Rivers.Credit
The Mark Twain House and Museum

You can look, for example, at a replica of one of Clemens’s handwritten tax bills — for $1,277.41, which is about $27,000 in 2012 dollars — while considering Twain’s observation that “There isn’t a rich man in your vast city who doesn’t perjure himself every year before the tax board.” The baseball and catcher’s mask meant to illustrate the growing popularity of professional baseball are offset by the text of an ad Clemens placed in the May 20, 1875, edition of The Hartford Courant, after watching the hometown Dark Blues play the Boston Red Stockings:

TWO HUNDRED & FIVE DOLLARS REWARD — At the great baseball match on Tuesday, while I was engaged in hurrahing, a small boy walked off with an English-made brown silk UMBRELLA belonging to me, & forgot to bring it back. I will pay $5 for the return of that umbrella in good condition to my house on Farmington avenue. I do not want the boy (in an active state) but will pay two hundred dollars for his remains.

We don’t find out if Clemens ever got his umbrella, or if Twain got the boy. But even as “The Gilded Age of Hartford” allows the city’s single most celebrated resident to make us laugh, it also finds unexpected ways to make us feel. And it’s not just with the smattering of items relating to the private life of the Clemens family — a well-worn wicker picnic basket, a faded high school report card, a pair of topaz cuff links still in their original velvet box. (The personal history is better told, of course, next door, in the Mark Twain House itself.)

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A tin of blood orange pellets sold at E. J. Hoadley, a Hartford confectioner.Credit
John Groo/The Mark Twain House and Museum

Nor does this show’s emotional subtext spring from its many nostalgia-triggers — among them a 19th-century all-in-one school desk, an enormous candy tin for “blood orange pellets,” a high-wheeled bicycle manufactured in Hartford (as well as a quaint costume for female riders). Instead of just parading the outward signs of Hartford’s success — grand edifices like H. H. Richardson’s R. & F. Cheney Building, major industries like the arms-maker Colt, civic improvements like parks and hospitals — the photos, documents and objects chosen by the museum’s chief curator, Patti Philippon, also elucidate the subsurface tensions threatening it.

While the show has a section devoted to the black painter Charles Ethan Porter and the moral and financial support he initially received from Clemens, it also makes clear that this prosperous city filled with thriving businesses harbored overt prejudice. The many trade cards on display carry innocuous advertising copy — “Our Mamas All Need a ‘Hartford’ Sewing Machine” — along with some harshly racist caricatures. Jews and Roman Catholics were allowed to build houses of worship, but the city directory didn’t even make a pretense of equating them to Hartford’s Protestant churches.

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Members of the staff of Hartford Hospital, 1886.Credit
The Mark Twain House and Museum

The period’s booming economy inevitably alternated with busts, and desperate poverty and intractable disease expanded along with the trolley lines and factories. As the show notes, the stalwart efforts of local charities, churches, wealthy philanthropists and medical personnel at the growing Hartford Hospital could make only a small dent in these problems. A pair of hard-used wooden crutches and the haunting photograph of a dirty, sick-looking itinerant beggar known as the Leatherman are the most moving things in “The Gilded Age of Hartford,” precisely because no measure of gilding can disguise their sad meaning.

It was, of course, Twain and his Hartford neighbor, Charles Dudley Warner, who bestowed the name “Gilded Age” on the last third of the 19th century, with their 1873 novel, “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.” Its withering assessment of greed and chicanery across all levels of American society informs each of the displays in “The Gilded Age of Hartford,” and there’s no way to avoid noticing that this exhibition, too, tells a tale of today.

“The Gilded Age of Hartford” is at the Mark Twain House and Museum, 351 Farmington Avenue, Hartford, through Sept. 2. Information: marktwainhouse.org or (860) 247-0998.

A version of this review appears in print on March 31, 2013, on Page CT9 of the New York edition with the headline: At Twain’s Home, an Era He Skewered. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe